Honestly Officer it was just a complete accident................

I guess we won't know without knowing what they were trying to make, and knowing how to make those explosives.

But you can make very different things indeed by adding things in different orders or adding different quantities of things, in chemistry. So I think it is perfectly plausible.
 
If you will let hungover/still drunk students into the chemical cupboard then this is the sort of thing that'll happen!
 
TheMightyTen said:
So then OcUK chemists how is it possible to "accidently" make a high explosive?
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Get blindfold, have little to no understanding of chemistry then start mixing!

I wonder what they were doing that this was a possibility.

Edit: looks like it's relatively simple to make. Not really sure what they were doing to accidently make it though.
 
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Acme said:
I guess we won't know without knowing what they were trying to make, and knowing how to make those explosives.

But you can make very different things indeed by adding things in different orders or adding different quantities of things, in chemistry. So I think it is perfectly plausible.
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Triacetone triperoxide, according to the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-38991983

But they've been known to misspell 'methadone' as 'mephedrone' - a very different substance - so no guarantees it was actually TATP.
 
I saw all sorts of stupid stuff in labs as a student.

I will say that the stupidest thing was probably the least dangerous. A friend manage to accidentally set off the safety badges located in our radiation labs twice in a week. The building was evacuated each time. He had brazil nuts in his lab-coat pocket when leaning near the safety badge.

Everyone went nuts at him when we found out. Why the **** would anyone even bring food into a radiation lab anyway...


The coolest thing was seeing someone knocked over a liquid helium dewar when using it. It rolled away a bit letting it out through a valve system. luckily someone was near the windows to open them because within moments the floor was pretty much iced over (from water vapour in the air i guess) and really slippery, making the scramble to seal it unsafe and somewhat difficult. The guy wanted to freeze a banana skin... We were lucky the windows were easily opened and we didnt suffocate
 
seems a bit odd to make acetone peroxide by mistake, its not a simple case of mixing them together (but its not particularly difficult).

having said that people often made various explosives by mistake when i was a student, but we were allowed to carry out nitrations back then. I bet they don't let students do that any more, its a recipe for disaster!
 
A former science teacher at the secondary school I went to accidentally made an explosive involving either potassium or lithium I don't remember which and demolished a wall - fortunately was outside of normal hours.
 
Avenged7Fold said:
I saw all sorts of stupid stuff in labs as a student.

I will say that the stupidest thing was probably the least dangerous. A friend manage to accidentally set off the safety badges located in our radiation labs twice in a week. The building was evacuated each time. He had brazil nuts in his lab-coat pocket when leaning near the safety badge.

Everyone went nuts at him when we found out. Why the **** would anyone even bring food into a radiation lab anyway...
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Maybe he thought he'd gain super powers by eating an irradiated Brazil nut?
Either that or he was a keen horticulturist in his spare time and wanted to combine his hobby and job to do some Atomic Gardening?

Or maybe just a big numpty.


Slightly more seriously it goes to show how sensitive the monitoring of the dosages is, not to mention a demonstration of how low a dose is needed in a monitored environment to set off an alarm.
It's one of the things that I wish more people realised when they read how there was an "alarm" at one a nuclear site, or a leak (that might have been less than they'd have been exposed to on a long haul flight or visit to some towns built on granite).
 
Yeah, the safety alarms are way to sensitive but to be honest, there shouldnt be any reason that they are set off. Brazil nuts being quite radioactive as a food and easily enough to set off the alarms or turn the safety badges a different colour are a silly thing to carry around with you not just for the alarm part but i personally wouldn't carry any food i intend to ingest in a rad lab. All it takes is for a bit of the wrong thing to get chipped off or fall onto it and you are risking getting pretty ill. There was a story of students who ended up getting sick in their dorm because they didn't tie their hair up and a small source material used to calibration somehow ended up in a girls frizz (a reason why hair should be tied up in a lab)
 
aardvark said:
seems a bit odd to make acetone peroxide by mistake, its not a simple case of mixing them together (but its not particularly difficult).

having said that people often made various explosives by mistake when i was a student, but we were allowed to carry out nitrations back then. I bet they don't let students do that any more, its a recipe for disaster!
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Nah they still do, heard a couple of years back a student at my old school made some of a well known unstable nitration based product.

Fortunately nothing much happened, although i do wonder given he's known for having a pyromaniac streak in him
 
Are they not that sensitive in order to detect sources long before they become a real issue?

Didn't know Brazil nuts were radioactive :eek:.

Edit: I miss the ability to berate my English in edit reasons :(.
 
Well radiation from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. If the source is across the room, it will have a many time weaker reading than if it was next to the badge, so i guess thats why they are sensitive. They are not so sensitive that anything sets it off, and unless you got particularly radioactive every day things literately touching it, its unlikely it will do anything.

In this specific case brazil nuts was the source and it was in this case right next to the detector when he lent near it. Everything is radioactive to a degree and though brazil nuts are many times more radioactive than other foods, they are not dangerous. Bananas which contain potassium 40 also more radioactive than other foods.
 
"By accident" my arse.

Here's a story for you:

I went to a technical school and in our workshop we had all manner of amazing tools. One thing we could never get our hands on was chain. I noticed that to prevent an angle grinder getting nicked, they chained it to a work bench. With no interest in the grinder, I used it to cut the chain off (there's some irony in there somewhere). The end of this chain was then inserted into a bit of steel pipe which was then bashed flat and the chain was welded in place. I polished it up using a belt sander and stamped the word "Spanky" in to it. A teacher caught me with it and confiscated it. The next day I rang the school and asked for him. When he went to answer the phone, I nicked Spanky from his drawer and a mate put it in the storage compartment of his scooter. On the way home the cops were doing routine insurance checks on scooters and they pulled him. Where were his papers? Right under Spanky. He was arrested and taken to the station until it was confirmed that he was in fact a good guy and that there were no reports of anyone getting battered by a foot of chain welded to a short pipe. He never grassed either, top man.

Yeah, we were proper naughty at school (and for the record, Spanky was made for lols and nothing else).

Cool story bro etc.
 
Acme said:
Cool story bro. (no sarcasm) :p
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Here's another one:

The ceiling of the workshop was very high, almost 3 stories. The ceiling tiles were those cork-y things. One day I threw a welding rod in the air and it got stuck in a ceiling tile. The teacher didn't notice. The next time he left, the entire class started throwing stuff up and loads of it stuck. We even made ninja stars by welding two bits of flat in an X shape and sharpening the ends. These things were lethal and could seriously hurt someone if they were hit with it. The lookout flagged that the teacher was coming so we all went to our benches and cracked on. A deathly silence in the workshop wasruined by an unmistakeable sound of metal hitting the floor. The teacher happened to clock it and looked up, to find hundreds of metal bits and welding rods stuck in the ceiling tiles, just waiting to fall down and stab someone in their dome. We were unable to use that workshop for a week whilst we waited for someone to come and replace the tiles. During this time all our classes were spent instead washing floors and walls.
 
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